LICH's clumsy closing

A fruitless fight in Brooklyn cost SUNY about $100 million.

The tortured saga of Long Island College Hospital finally appears to be over. It should never have happened, of course.

The State University of New York agreed in June to sell the money-losing Brooklyn medical campus to developers led by Fortis Property Group, which plans to shrink the health care component and add housing. It is essentially the same deal SUNY was going to make a year ago, before Pollyanna-ish residents, self-interested unions and ambitious elected officials mounted a legal and political challenge that cost taxpayers and students roughly $100 million to keep an unneeded hospital open.

The locals were misguided, but their reaction was human: People like having a hospital nearby. Blinded by emotions, they ignored that their hospital was outdated, superfluous and uneconomical, and that "saving" it undermined wiser efforts to make health care delivery in Brooklyn sustainable.

SUNY's three years of ownership of Long Island College Hospital were certainly disastrous, but the market had spoken long before the university system acquired it. The business simply did not have enough paying customers to survive. Subsidizing its existence merely threatened the viability of other hospitals in the borough.

The unions, representing nurses and other hospital workers, were trying to save their members' jobs. That is what unions do. But even they came to see that the trend away from hospitalization—and patients' increasing preference for Manhattan's brand-name providers—necessitated a reduction in Brooklyn's number of beds. One downsizing beats a systemic collapse any day.

The politicians have no excuses. Those who opposed the hospital's closure were either pandering for votes or in denial. Bill de Blasio made it a cause célèbre, getting arrested at a protest and not abandoning his rhetoric and litigation until after winning the mayoralty. Public Advocate Letitia James was even worse, continuing her counterproductive resistance even after ascending from a Brooklyn City Council seat to her citywide post. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries were among the few local elected officials who didn't jump on the bandwagon.

The sale and conversion of the hospital was also delayed by judges who pushed the state into an incredibly unwieldy settlement. SUNY had to keep the zombie hospital open despite a monthly loss of up to $13 million, wait out an absurd scoring of bids by a panel including third-party amateurs, and grant exclusive 30-day negotiating windows to bidders it didn't want. Making health care efficient has never been so cumbersome or so costly.